One of those foo-foo film sites. By Glenn Kenny

"Critics"

February 27, 2013

The journalist-turned-screenwriter Joe Eszterhas has, either
in spite or because of his standing as something of a self-important clod, made
several significant contributions to the lexicon of show business. I was
reminded recently of his late ‘80s citation of his former agent, the
diminuitive and feisty Michael Ovitz. Ovitz, according to Eszterhas, responded
to Eszterhas’ announcement that he was leaving Ovitz and his agency CAA by
telling Eszterhas that he, Ovitz, had “foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire
Boulevard each day” who would “blow [Eszterhas’] brains out.” Such colorful
language. Hollywood, like so many other fields of endeavor, is full of
emotionally disturbed people who often fancy themselves tough guys.

What brought the denied-by-Ovitz Ovitz pronouncement to mind
was a piece that appeared on New York magazine’s Vulture website nearly two
weeks ago, by one Brian McGreevy, entitled “Don’t Call Lena Dunham ‘Brave.’” I
need not go into the larger substance of the piece here; I’m not a television
critic and I’ve already (I think) expressed my opinions on the use of the word
“brave” as applied to performers, artists, what have you. What struck me was
what came after McGreevy’s largely sensible exhortation that Lena Dunham’s
public persona does not necessarily line up with Lena Dunham’s function as a
creator or artist. “Lena Dunham is not weak,” McGreevy warns the reader. “Lena
Dunham will cut your throat in your sleep.”

“She will do no such thing,” I laughed. I laughed even more
because prior to his fulminations in this vein (and there are a lot of them),
McGreevy included a clause reading “as a producer.” What has McGreevy produced?
According to his bio below the piece, he has executive-produced a Netflix
series based on a book he has written.

I know that David Foster Wallace once made mild fun of Susan
Faludi for referring to a porn movie set as an “ecology,” but reading
McGreevy’s piece I myself found myself contemplating a cultural ecology in
which an individual with precisely one producing credit to his name feels
sufficiently confident to swing an inflated rhetorical dick around like he’s
Mace Neufeld or something (I’ve actually met Mace Neufeld and I doubt he’d
stoop to anything so vulgar, or unnecessary). A cultural ecology in which the
Internet arm of a major publication will pay probably-not-that-good money for
the inflated rhetorical dick swinging. And most of all, a cultural ecology in
which consumers are expected to be pleased to be told that Lena Dunham will cut their throats in their sleep.

“[A]ll art is a product of shameless opportunism that
deserves to be applauded,” McGreevy continues. “[Dunham] is a woman who has
risen through a masculine power hierarchy to become one of the most important
culture-makers of the 21st century without compromising her artistic identity,
and is fucking a rock star, this is more or less as baller as it gets.”

The unfortunate adolescent quality of McGreevy’s language
aside, we are, once again, quite a long way from the ethos of our old friend
Andrei Tarkovsky, who once wrote: “Ultimately artists work at their profession
not for the sake of telling someone about something but as an assertion of
their will to serve people. I am staggered by artists who assume that they
freely create themselves, that it is actually possible to do so; for it is the
lot of the artist to accept that he is created by his time and the people
amongst whom he lives. As Pasternak put it:

“Keep awake, keep awake, artist,

Do not give in to sleep…

You are eternity’s hostage

And prisoner of time.

“And I’m convinced that if an artist succeeds in doing
something, he does so nly because that is what people need—even if they are not
aware of it at the time. And so it’s always the audience who win, who gain
something, while the artist loses, and has to pay out.”

II

Call me crazy, but I see a pretty straight line connecting a
skepticism toward the “difficult” in art and “We Saw Your Boobs,” a production
number I’ll admit to having missed during its initial broadcast, and still
haven’t caught up with. Hostile, ugly, sexist: these are the words that The New
Yorker’s Amy Davidson uses to describe Oscar host Seth MacFarlane’s schtick as
host of the ceremonies. I have to admit my reaction to some of the outrage (not Davidson's, I hasten to add), in part, is to
say, in my imagination, and now here, to a certain breed of multi-disciplinary
pop-culture enthusiast, well, you picked your poison, now you can choke on it.
It’s all well and good to make “fun,” “irreverence,” “FUBU” or any number of
related qualities the rocks upon which you build the church of your aesthetic,
or your worldview. But you might want to remember the precise parameters of the
choices you made on the occasion that they bite you on the ass. Not to mix
metaphors or anything.

Also published on the Internet around two weeks ago, on the
website Buzzfeed, was something I guess is referred to as a listicle, entitled
“What’s The Deal With Jazz?” in which the author, Amy Rose Spiegel, expressed
her immense disdain for the musical form in digital rebus style. She takes
immaculate care to only lampoon the white, and rather hackish (per conventional
wisdom), practitioners of the form, until the very end, in which she allows
“But really, the worst part of despising jazz is when people say ‘No, no, you
just haven’t heard the good stuff! Blah blah blah Miles Davis Charles Mingus
blah blah blerg.’ Actually, I have. I have, and I hate it.”

Now all this is arguably ignorant, arguably hateful,
arguably racist. It excited a fair amount of disapprobation in my circle on
Twitter, where it became clear that some of the people complaining about it
were friendly with the piece’s “editor,” to whom I myself expressed some
displeasure, and she in turn expressed displeasure that I was making it
“personal.” Call me crazy, again, but I can’t see too much of a way not to
respond “personally” to such a piece. Plenty of people in the “conversation”
allowed that, well, Buzzfeed DOES do great things, but that this wasn’t one of
them, and that it was regrettable. I see it completely the opposite way. I see “What’s
The Deal With Jazz?” as absolutely emblematic of Buzzfeed and all it stands
for, just as I see the charming piece called “Django Unattained: How Al
Sharpton Ruined A Cool Collector’s Item” as absolutely emblematic of the site
Film School Rejects. I know I’m possibly coming off like Susan Sontag yammering
about how a million Mozarts could not cancel out the fact that the white race
is the cancer of civilization. I’m aware of the good that is out there. But
let’s face it: Robert Fure, Amy Rose Spiegel, and tens of thousands of others
are eager to bulldoze it, and the Jeff Jarvises of the world are happy to let
them do it, if only because it will prove their theories about the Internet to
be correct.

In 1998 a couple of writer friends, who I’ll call K and
L, made me the gift of a personal
introduction to a man I’ll call D, whose work as a journalist and an artist I
had long admired. Our first dinner was at a steakhouse on Tenth Avenue, after
which we went to see P.J. Harvey at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Great show, you
shoulda been there. Anyway, during the course of the dinner conversation, K was
talking about how he had recently seen the movie Belly, a kind of hip-hop
gangster movie starring DMX and Nas and directed by Hype Williams. K described
his discomfort with the movie and some of its depictions, but was having
trouble articulating that discomfort. D, a person of exceptional perspicacity
and directness, and someone who had been something of a professional mentor to
K in the past, cut to the chase.

“Did you find it morally objectionable?”

K thought this over for a bit. It was clear that he did not
want to seem prim. It was also clear that trying to bullshit D wouldn’t do.

“Yes,’ he said. “Yes, I found it morally objectionable.”

D smiled and cut into his steak and said, “Well then you
should say: ‘I found it morally objectionable.’”

June 29, 2012

Tim Grierson, writing at Deadspin, allows that he "likes" Beasts of the Southern Wild, further generously admitting that he's impressed by the "boldness of its ambitions" and the "depth of its emotional pull." That's the good news. But Tim has some bad news too, which is that the movie exemplifies the five worst indie-film clichés EVER!

But does it really? I don't know Mr. Grierson, and up until now I haven't sampled his work much (thanks a pantload, Jeffrey Wells), but it's clear he went to school and learned a little jargon and has a kit bag from which he can produce terminology to prove his point. Or has/can/does he? My general counter-argument to Mr. Grierson's is that his agenda here and perhaps in general is to outsmart art, rather than to examine and describe it. And that, proceeding from there, he merely unpacks a bunch of received academic/critical ideas, throws them at Beasts, and figures they'll stick, mainly because his terminology is kid-tested/mom-approved. This is my nice/fancy way of saying I think his theses are full of shit. Let's look at them one at a time.

Grierson kicks off by accusing Beasts of "fetishizing 'authenticity'." If you know your Lacan and Zizek, and if you've read the occasionally feisty music critic lay out a lecture you on how, you know, Charlie Patton was actually a POP musician, you'll recognize in this phrase a very big double no-no. Lucky for us, then, that when marshalling proof for this claim, he only refers to promotional materials about the making of the film, not with what's actually on screen. "[P]eople lap up stories about how Zeitlin and his cast and crew essentially lived in the handmade world of their fictional Bathtub while making the movie," Grierson sighs (I assume). "Knowing that the filmmaker personally pounded nails into wood doesn't tell us a thing about how he did at making a movie." Agreed. I don't ever wonder if Godard got seasick while shooting Film socialisme myself. But, I'm sorry, you were saying Beasts of the Southern Wild fetishizes "authenticity." Are you suggesting that its hype is inextricable from the movie itself? Because if you are, that's a different argument. That you are also not making.

Next, Grierson says Beasts"Tries Way Too Hard To be Gritty". Like a few of his other complaints, this definitely falls into the realm of the judgment call, although the extent to which one's argument that a film is "trying to hard" is effective is of course relative to the number of pertinent examples one lays out in support of the assertion. Here Grierson does not do as well as he might. He cites "stale art-house moves" such as "shaky handheld" and...and...and...oh, "other self-conscious camera tricks." Oh. Those. "Contrary to popular opinion"...UH-OH..."having the occasionally out-of-focus shot doesn't automatically suggest 'realness.'" Oooh, snap. OK, aside from the fact that the term "realness" has some Urban Dictionary cred and a vague peripheral connection to what some contemporary philosophers refer to as "the Real," it's a pretty vague term, and Grierson has little leg to stand on in assuming that it is the precise quality that Beast's director Benh Zeitlin was after. For myself, one of the things that impressed me with respect to the visuals in Beasts was a certain deceptive quality; that the way certain shots were set up, handheld or not, giving the viewer the expectation of something relatively mundane happening in the frame, and then something rather unexpected and thrilling and literally dangerous taking place, as in the scene in which a trailer catches fire, which literally had me holding my breath. This elaborate effect was all the more startling for being approached in such a seemingly offhand way, and in retrospect gives one the impression that Zeitlin is a filmmaker in very tight control over his effects, and that the "accidents" that one might take the "occasional" out-of-focus shots for are not accidents, or any such like thing.

The really rich seam of pernicious bullshit is contained in Gierson's assertion and argument with respect to supposed indie-film-cliché number three, "It Treats Poverty As Something Noble." The ostensible nobility of poverty is a complex and vexed issue, as Saint Francis would no doubt tell you were he to appear on earth at this very moment. But after making this assertion, Grierson declines to go directly there. Rather, he just writes: 'There have been eyebrows raised about the fact that Hushpuppy and Wink are black, while Zeitlin is white." Grierson then cites Richard Brody, who makes a not entirely laughable proposition—whether the movie taps into "magical, mythical blackness" is certainly worth arguing about, but not so much if you preface it with an admonishment concerning the film's "love for its characters," oy—and...that's it. Again, how convenient to have all these raised eyebrows at your disposal.

Fact is, there should not be a single eyebrow raised, and for the record, I just got off the phone with a film-savvy friend who was very taken with Beasts and didn't have a single idea as to the ethnicity of its director. Years ago, Anthony Burgess made some cranky noises at the forces of what is incorrectly termed "political correctness" and asserted that as an artist, he had every right to imagine himself into the world and voice of a homosexual, which he was not, or of a black man, which he was not. (He did exactly that in the novels Earthly Powers and M/F, respectively, if I'm not mistaken.) To deny the artist his or her imaginative prerogative on the grounds that the artist is not the thing that he or she is imagining is a form of aesthetic totalitarianism, pure and simple, and if that's the way Grierson wants things that's fine but he should at least be honest about it. But where were we? Oh, the "poverty as something noble" bit. Again, it's a judgment call. I think the residents of the movie's "Bathtub" who refuse to clear out are a bunch of loony drunks, myself. Yes, the film sets them apart as unique, and depicts the forces that come to clear them out in a way that's almost as sinister as the Orwellian campaign van in Altman's Nashville. But with respect to nobility, or a desirable way to live, I don't see how Beasts is actively selling that. Yes, its subjectivity deals with how its protagonist Hushpuppy perceives/survive the insanity and physical calamity around her, and the things within that matrix she's become attached to, but that's hardly the same thing as validating/valorizing a way of life. Again, the baggage here is not the film's but the perfectly insipid counterintuitive don't-love-me-I'm-really-not-THAT-kind-of-liberal non-response Grierson's so invested in erecting.

Bringing us to four, "It Confuses Simple Characters For Memorable Ones." I wonder, had Grierson been on the set of the film, and then in the editing room, at what point he could have said to Zeitlin, "Hey, wait a minute, you're making a mistake..." But again, Grierson doesn't make the argument. Instead, he says that the young girl who plays Hushpuppy is "undeniably captivating" but that the "filmmakers don't really give her a character to play." Huh? It's pretty clear she's a resourceful resilient very young person in an impossible situation, and she's certainly mythologized at least a bit, I can't deny that, but you know, she does also have a kind of quest, that being a reconnection with an absent and herself somewhat mythologized mother. But that's not enough "character" I guess. Further evidence that Grierson's assembling a straw man comes when he bitches that her "banal voiceover musings" are "treated as cockeyed wisdom." Well, they are in voice-over, so they clearly have some significance to them. Does the film make a church out of them? No. The girl is five goddamn years old. The viewer is meant to weigh the pronouncements against the fact that they're coming out of a five year old. Finally, Grierson lays the hammer down and damningly compares Hushpuppy to Forrest Gump, clearly one of the least memorable characters in all cinema, indie or studio, Nyah. Nyah. Nyah. (I'm not even going to get into the assertion that by putting a five-year-old in the lead role Zeitlin was self-consciously "critic-proofing" the movie. No more adorable children in movies, indie filmmakers; that's CHEATING.)

God, I'm exhausted.

Fortunately, we are up to cliché five, which I believe Orson Welles would characterize as "Impossible! Meaningless!," and it is that the film "Touches On Real-Life Events Without Saying Anything About Them." I know I've bored the tits off of most of you with my reiteration of Nabokov's "or still worse, 'What is the guy trying to say?'" So I don't need to get into that again. I'm not a big fan of "allegory" myself, but I don't argue that it ought not exist. Grierson's assertion that Beasts "tries to have it both ways" with respect to Hurricane Katrina is, one more time, more to do with the baggage he wants to load the film down with than anything that actually occurs when the film itself is onscreen.

It occurs to me that I went through a whole lot of trouble here when the sheer shittiness of Grierson's project here is handily epitomized by the way he uses the phrase "Sundance darling" in his headline.

Finally, I am more in sympathy with David Edelstein's review of the movie. And if you consider Edelstein to be precisely the "type" of critic who would be suspicious of a movie coming in on Beast's wheels of promotion, well, that's kind of my point.

UPDATE: On his Twitter feed, a critic friend notes: "So I guess the new rule is: 'Privileged' people shouldn't make art about themselves (Girls) or anyone else (Beasts)." Hmm, pretty much. Although I suspect there may be an exception codicil for Louis C.K.. (No disrespect to Mr. C.K., who is indeed great.)

June 05, 2012

So for some reason or other the "film criticism, que-est-ce-que c'est" question is heating up again, in venues far and wide. First it's the topic of discussion between the ever-insouciant David Carr and my screening-room buddy A.O. Scott at the New York Times' new kinda-video-podcast series "The Sweet Spot," which kind of proceeds from Carr's misapprehension that the function of criticism is buzzkill. Mr. Scott strives mightily to correct Carr's misapprehension, to very little avail, if the cutaways to Carr squinting in apparent disbelief are to be believed. "You're just defending your posse," the intelligent but querelous Carr parries, and it's a measure of how much film critics in particular are disrespected that Carr seems so much more willing to buy Roberta Smith's rationale for the existence of criticism rather than Scott's. Never mind that seven minutes and change is hardly sufficient time to really begin to address the question of what criticism actually IS, its ideal form, its history, how it both interesects with and differs from the practice of "reviewing" and so on.

The video spurred some social-media rumination from the ever laid-back and relaxed and terse movie blogger and entertainment journalist watchdog David Poland, who, on discovering a further rumination from my friendly acquaintance Michelle Dean, which quoted the infamous "Don't be critics, you people, I beg you" screed from Saint Dave Eggers, jumped on that shit like he'd just dug up a new Dead Sea Scroll (the Eggers piece in question is over a decade old, but no matter), and wrote up this commendation of it. Which in turn led to a really quite fascinating and ongoing comments thread which features, among other things, a lively exchange in which writer and scripter Drew McWeeney presses Poland to name the movie he actually worked on that apparently gives him, David Poland, the Sacred Dave Eggers Dispensation To Write Movie Criticism Because He's Actually Worked On A Movie. (In case you'd like more than just an inference, by the way, I'll come right out and say it: I have a lot of friends and colleagues in common with Eggers, etcetera, but I think that riff about critics and criticism is one of the bigger barrels of horseshit I've ever fallen face-first into, and it's pretty damn hippy-dippy horseshit at that. Examination and or analysis, which I figure to be the two key features of real criticism, do not amount to the same thing as sticking a pin through a butterfly's innards. Of course examination and or analysis don't really figure in a lot of stuff calling itself criticism these days, but that's hardly the point. The assertion that the critical impulse derives from the worst part of the self is itself absolutely despicable and nothing but a glob of Egger's own phlegmy resentment, of what I have no idea I'm sure.)

What comes out most plainly in this particular wash (and what a messy wash it is) is Poland's own aiding and abetting of an old myth about critics, that is, those who can't do, criticise. And, more specifically in this field, that every film critic is somehow a failed filmmaker. Poland actually comes out and admits that he "ended up in journalism and criticism, which I never wanted." He hastens to add "but I loved the idea of what would become The Hot Button." Yeah, me too. While Poland's admissions are apt to confirm the prejudices of critic-haters everywhere, I should like to say that, speaking strictly for myself, I did not enter criticism as a failed filmmaker.

Or did I? See this post for some background. And savor again the immortal line "There's nothing wrong with getting a hard-on in a movie theater." (And, if you're wondering how Danny Amis is doing, well, he's better these days; see here.) The Beach Movie experience was instructive, but did it sour me off the film business? I can't say it did; a move to L.A. was something I never considered, then or ever after. Before it, and after it, I was an avid reader of criticism and a spotty writer of material that I thought aspired to criticism. My heroes were Lester Bangs (whose band I saw a few times at CBGB; one of said bands had Billy Ficca on drums; Billy now plays in Gods and Monsters with my great friend Gary Lucas), James Wolcott, and Robert Christgau, among others. While I dicked around with making music in the late '70s/early '80s (and am currently dicking around with music again, and with the same group of dicks, or at least some of them), my biggest ambition at that time, I'm not kidding, was to write about rock and roll, in the Village Voice, and have Robert Christgau as my editor. And in 1984, at 24 years of age, I fulfilled that ambition. I wrote about the album The Naked Shakespeare, by Peter Blegvad (whose now-adult daughter, Kaye, a wonderful artist in her own right, who was not yet a gleam in Peter's eye when Shakespeare was made,I'm having coffee with tomorrow); a record Bob Christgau didn't like too much but which I had hectored him into allowing me to review over a correspondance beginning in the summer of 1983. Having thus acheived my ambition, I somehow had to fill out the rest of my professional life. Sigh. I did a lot of work as an editor, but criticism was something I always held as sacred even as I never really believed I was practicing it. To be entirely honest with you, I think in all the years I've been publishing, there's maybe two dozen pieces of mine that I could point to and say, "Yes, this is actual criticism." (One of those pieces is in this upcoming book.) I don't think reviewing and criticism are incompatible; indeed, they can't be. But reviewing, or deadline criticism if you want to call it that, has its own set of demands and stresses. To me, "real" criticism needs temporal and mental space to clear the field for a thorough examination OR, to go back to Eggers' imagery, to follow the "butterfly" on the path it takes. Or the work in question's pattern of reverberation if you will. This is not a realm where reviewing necessarily has the ABILITY to go.

But I love criticism, always have, and I love it as it was practiced by Baudelaire and I love it as it was practiced by David Foster Wallace and, well, and so on. I love it as it was practiced by Nick Tosches, even when he was writing about albums he never even listened to. I often tell people that I would have been happy to have aged into the Stanley Kaufmann of Premiere, had the magazine lasted. I am in complete concurrence with Manny Farber: "I can't imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can't imagine anything more valuable to do, and I've always felt that way." SO in case you wonder why I tend to take the pulings and mewlings of pseud jagoff opinion-mongerers calling themselves "critics" so personal-like, well, it isn't JUST because I'm a reactive sorehead lunatic.

The current logistical irony is that, in the contemporary environment, I'm compelled to explore making a living in other forms of writing. One of which, as it happens, is....well, I imagine you can guess.

UPDATE: David Poland is, as you'll see in comments below, not thrilled with my characterization of him. Seriously, while I admit that I'm quite prone to going overboard when making sport of other writers, the point of this piece was not meant to be "David Poland's an asshole," or any such thing, and I regret having given the impression, if I did. I have my differences with Poland on a lot of things, including modes of expression, but I'm not in a position to make real judgments on the guy, and I do believe that if nothing else that his heart is in the right place, integrity wise. But as another man once said in a not-entirely dissimilar context, these are the jokes, people.

December 27, 2011

I normally don't re-post anonymous e-mails from folks who are displeased with my reviewing style, but this piece, received this morning (December 27, day after Boxing Day!), had an interesting, albeit perhaps inadvertent, Cummings vibe to it, and...well, like Steve Inwood said to John Travolta in Stayin' Alive, "an anger...and an intensity." I admit I was mainly taken by the formatting, which I reproduce here as exactly as the TypePad template makes possible. You think I should track this guy down and have him watch The Girlfriend Experience? Anyway, the "title" comes from the e-mail's subject line.

hmm some critic

Glenn Kenny

some damn critic you turned out to be.

you slandering good movies down left and right like if you was god.

which by all means your not god and never will be,.. those movies you put down and said was bad movies was pretty good to the general public and they made more money then you can come close to even dream of making.

and you also seem to slander stars too, what an idiot you turned out to be.

No wonder you got fired for being a critic !

negative criticism to every good movie out there will get you fired and if you slander a star or a person !

where was your head any way ?....up your ass hole where the sun don’t shine ?

I buy those movies and love them and collect them.

like star wars and twilight and few other sagas.

I bet you didn’t have your meds the day you critic’s about those new movie’s and probably haven’t gotten laid in long time.

or maybe you was drunk or high off your ass when you did it.

I don’t know and I really don’t care.

I am glad you got fired !!.... and dude if you ever get hired by some one else I bet you have loads of hatters spamming your crap and throwing away your criticism if it’s on a new paper.

or better yet using it to wipe their ass off with.

poor boy critic’s like you just cause hate and make people dislike you.

there’s more fans to those movies you slander then you have for fans.

you ever think about that ?,..hmm” do you every consider it that those stars and movies has more beloved fans and family then your sorry ass does ?

why you think those stars and movies make more money in 1 day out at the theatres and the stars make more money doing 1 day film shoot then you do in 1 year !!

have some common sense and brains, cause by the looks of your writings of criticism is a joke and you show poor judgment !

this the first email I ever sent to a stupid idiot critic in my life.

I normally don’t bother to read or read all the way through critics posts or writings, I usually by pass them and throw them out or block them online.

cause I think most of you types are morons and jealous freaks cause they can’t get a spot to do their own acting work or start a good acting career !

so they whine and cry and slander other stars work and slander movies,... that is pretty damn low.

their just out there performing and doing the best they can to do what makes them happy and to make others happy.

cause they got the balls to actually do it and try for it,.. plus they have the talent !

it takes allot to get on a stage and be on film to act and wonder if your good or doing a good job.

and in many cases they are doing a good job if they keep getting hired !!

people like you just go around slandering them in magazines and news papers and stuff, giving them a bad out look.

when they should be hearing hey you did a good job doing that film or hey that was some great performance you did doing the scene.

I really hope your career has ended for good.

cause like you said about those stars and those movies “ YOU SUCK “ !!!

November 21, 2011

Above, a couple of youngsters of my acquaintance, ages four and seven, a few minutes prior to the November, 20th 2 p.m. SAG screening of Martin Scorsese's Hugo, at New York's Ziegfeld Theater.

Last month I was lucky to be able to see an unfinished version of Scorsese's picture at a work-in-progress screening at the New York Film Festival, and sheep that I am, I decided to take Richard Peña's request to not tweet about or review the film seriously. My screening companion, Farran Smith Nehme a.k.a. The Self Styled Siren, and myself were kind of appalled by the near-instant spate of social media assessments of the film that followed the screening, and Farran was particularly taken aback by the pronouncement of many such wise folks that Hugo was too slow for today's kids to get into and that, regardless of its artistic achievements, it would prove a misfire in the family-film category. She was of the opinion that her own small kids—she has three, including twins who are pushing double digits—would go for it in a big way, not least because it so effectively trades in on that extremely resonant trope of children's literature, that is, the Secret Place at the Repository of Imagination. In Hugo it's the rafters of a great Parisian train station, where the title character works on an automaton that's the last inheritance of his...well, you'll know when you see it. (Reprobate that I am, I myself was reminded by these environs of the cathedral bell-ringer's apartment in Huysmann's La bas.) Warming to Farran's disapprobation, I noted that many of those questioning Hugo's kid-friendliness had no offspring of their own, and a good thing too. I also wondered whether some of them were not in fact legally enjoined from standing within 500 feet of a schoolyard. But.

Anyway. Sunday I was invited to moderate a post-screening Q&A after the Ziegfeld showing, and I was allowed to bring some guests, so my wife and I asked our pals who shall remain nameless if they wanted to come and bring the above-depicted moppets. I admit I was a little nervous. I loved Hugo; would they? Would I be forced to utter the words that were, and remain, death to me, those being "David Poland was right?" Well, as it happens, no. Despite their pre-screening potential raucousness as documented in the above shot, once the lights went down, the kids were...absolutely rapt. Silent as church mice. Except for an occasional ooh and/or aaah at a particularly beautiful effect. There were a lot of other kids in the surrounding rows, and they were equally silent. One of the questions from the audience during the panel afterwards was posed by a pretty adorable girl of about six or so.

My friends had to leave before the panel, and the little fella actually bumped into Sir Ben Kingsley on the way out, which was kinda trippy. I asked their mom about what they thought, and she wrote me, "They loved it. [The four-year-old] loved the train station and sequences, but admittedly the plot line was a bit advanced for him....but it held him captive the entire time which is largely owed to the way the story was crafted. [The seven-year-old] was mesmerized and talked about it all night."

I know what some of you, and probably David Poland too, are thinking: "Whatever, Kenny; you're a film-snob homo, and most of your friends likely are too, bet this family force-feeds their kids Satantango for breakfast, and that the children were just relieved to finally see something in COLOR." But this is not only not nice, and shame on you, but it's also not so. The impression possibly created by the more radical/alienated pronouncements and attitudes on this blog and my Twitter feed notwithstanding, I in fact have a fair number of friends who are actually what you might call normal people, and the parents of the above-depicted delightful children happen to be among them. Solid citizens and professionals. Not weirdos or bohemians. They may have never even heard of Bela Tarr. So there.

Meanwhile, Farran herself writes: "The more I think about it, the more abhorrent it becomes to me that I am reading people I actually respect saying that Scorsese's late-movie paean to film history in Hugo is of interest only to film critics and film-history nerds. The entire [...] movie is an explicit rejection of that notion.

"So, to prove my point to myself, this evening I showed A Trip to the Moon to [the twins][...] And they loved it so much they asked for another one 'like that' as soon as it was done.

"Lest we say 'Well, of course they ate it up, these are Farran's kids,' let me remind you that the[y] are [also] the two sophisticated cinephiles who worshipped Jack & Jill."

October 27, 2011

Good Christ am I a tub in that shot. (Which shot also features, from left, non-tubs Jackson Ning and Wayne Chang. No, I am not making any 80s-rock related jokes about Wayne's name up there, either, in case you were wondering. Racist.)

Anyway, for part of Fandor's week-long celebration of the New York premiere and Fandor-streaming availability of Preston Miller's new film God's Land (which I am enjoined from giving much of an opinion on because, no duh), the delightful Fandor blog editor Kevin Lee asked me to write about my experience as a fat fuck playing a priest in that film, and I complied, and the resultant piece is here.

October 11, 2011

"No...You don't know what you're doing, you haven't done any research. You make it good for the rest of us by taking the crap off the market. Plus you're poor. [I told you he'd stop at nothing. It's this kind of thing that may well be Lou Reed's last tenuous hold on herodom. And I don't mean heroism.] And even if you weren't poor you wouldn't know what you were buying anyway. You wouldn't know how to weigh it, you don't know your metabolism, you don't know your sleeping quotient, you don't know when to eat and not to eat, you don't know about electricity..."

"The main thing is money, power and ego," I said, quoting an old Ralph J. Gleason column for some reason. I was getting a little dazed.

"No, it has to do with electricity and the cell structure..."

—Lester Bangs, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves," Creem, March 1975

September 22, 2011

Despite various sins against criticism, and the fact that I am sometimes moved to pity by the wailing and gnashing of teeth of my younger confreres, I've never felt moved to comment on the apprehension-producing output of one Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a really not-so-bright young thing whose staggering smug banalities suggest the witless confidence of the preternaturally attractive, and yet...oh, never mind. However, the gnashing of teeth attending her inaugural column for GQ—I'm not sure if it's both the print and online edition, but if it is, holy crap, copy desk, get on the stick; all that passive voice really tends to stick out on paper—has been sufficiently poignant to stir up sympathy enow to foster a word of commiseration or two.

Ms. Vargas-Cooper's column is dubbed "The New Canon," and therein she proposes to Take Very Seriously, or Kind Of Seriously In Her Ostensibly Sassy Way, the works of what she calls "our generation of filmmakers." That she chooses to first treat a picture by James Cameron brings up a question concerning that "our." James Cameron is older than ME, Natasha. I thought you were supposed to be a Bright YOUNG Thing. Ahem. But that's not important, as Leslie Nielsen (28 years Cameron's senior) said in Airplane!.

What is impor...well, not important, but kind of interesting, in a really irritating way, is how she prattles on as if she's doing something subversive or transgressive by proposing...wait for it...Terminator 2: Judgement Day for her "new canon." Didn't some notion relative to this idea come along with, um, Andy Warhol, or, wait, was it Milton Caniff, and didn't the "bums" WIN that particular argument? I mean, is this individual REALLY rekindling a high/low dispute that doesn't figure in ANYONE'S actual conversation about film or almost any other aspect of culture anymore? I mean, Kingsley Amis dubbed Terminator 2 an "unimpeachable masterpiece." David Foster Wallace disdained it as the first work of "effects porn," and bemoaned that it was a betrayal of its low-budget antecedent. Neither writer, each a certified bonafide highbrow with a fancy college edumication and everything, even hinted that the movie was in any way beneath their notice or consideration. Thinking seriously about a film like Terminator 2 was no more novel to either than, maybe, drinking a glass of water was. And yet here's Natasha Vargas-Cooper, flouncing around like a moron giggling "Look at me! I think Terminator 2 is actually a great movie! Aren't I naughty?"

Sigh. And I'm not even getting into the slack, stupid prose (as I believe I mentioned, that's a big ole passive voice ya got there, Natasha, and I say that as a feller who regularly piles on and abuses the subordinate clauses, if'n ya know what I'm sayin' and I reckon ya do), the unmotivated swipe at a classic film combined with a brag that she hasn't seen it (Rules of the Game, in case you're wondering...) and other such delights. As I said, it's causing a lot of pain for my chums ("Would GQ hire a literary columnist who bragged that she hadn't read Hamlet?" a friend writes, in genuine confusion and anger), but I can't get TOO worked up about it. "Professional" "arts" "writing," particularly on the internets, is becoming something of a zero-sum game conducted AGAINST the reader; the more effin' mad it makes you, the more the desperate-for-relevance-and-page-views editors think it's "hot" and "provocative" and likely to go "viral." And rest assured that Natasha Vargas-Cooper is laughing at you, very loud and very cattily. Include me out.

UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention, relative to a rather inappropriate (to the reading-comprehension and irony-challenged, at least) pastiche-joke I made on Twitter (although, on reflection, pastiche-jokes that call for a lot of contextualizing might not be entirely apt Twitter-fodder, alas), and a few of my phrasings above, that certain of my speculations and opinions concerning Vargas-Cooper were/are on the sexist side. For better or worse I've learned that saying "I am NOT sexist" when someone calls you sexist doesn't really earn you any slack, so my assurances that I would cite "the witless confidence of the preternatually attractive" with respect to a bad male writer who came on as if he looked like Armie Hammer would no doubt be exerted in vain, at least as far as those readers committed to being convinced of my sexism were concerned. Which is a long winded way of saying, "Sorry, but tough."

September 17, 2011

I was able to see A Dangerous Method last night, and was very taken with it. It's the latest film directed by David Cronenberg, a favorite of mine, and it was written by the Distinguished British Playwright Christopher Hampton, based on his own play The Talking Cure, which was itself suggested by John Kerr's book A Most Dangerous Method. I lay all this out because many of the lukewarm notices coming after the film's screenings in Telluride and Toronto have been implying that the presence of the likes of Hampton in the mix of creative contributors did not Let Cronenberg Be Cronenberg. I see the film rather differently; I think it's pretty brilliant, and almost ENTIRELY Cronenbergian. I, um, tweeted to that effect immediately after seeing the film, thusly, I'm afraid: "A DANGEROUS METHOD (Cronenberg, '11): Fascinating period remake of RABID. Knightley rules in the Chambers role. Don't believe the h8rs." I know, I know; I have to live with that "h8rs" until the day I die.

Anyway, I'm not going to do a full-on review of the film here, as I will likely be doing an official (and paid!) one for MSN Movies, but I'd like to report a bit on some of the reaction to my reaction. One Tweeter took extreme exception to my characterization: "Due respect, but that's nuts, Glenn. Talk about a reach. I say that as a huge fan of his work, too." That was an easy enough one to come back to: "Consider that in both films the heroines' respective maladies are metaphors for sexual power, if you will." A little later, a different objector protested that the film doesn't have "a cinematic bone in its body." Because I'm trying to improve my manners on Twitter, I kept my response to something along the lines of maybe-we-have-different-ideas-of-what-constitutes-"cinematic," to which my parrier responded "is 'visual storytelling' on your list?" and here, really, is where I had to resist the temptation to go all virtually Walter Sobchak on this guy's Smokey, if you know what I'm saying and I think you do...but I restrained myself. And I'm getting mad again just thinking about it. Because, trust me, my challenger was not David Bordwell.

It seems as if every time a film is adapted from a stage play it gives unimaginative and unobservant critics an opportunity to not look at what's actually in front of them and to reflexively condemn the resultant work as being "closed off" or "closed in" or "not cinematic." Alfred Hitchcock put paid to this notion in his discussion with François Truffaut of his (Hitchcock's) 1954 Dial "M" For Murder, or at least I thought so, schmuck as I may be. The thing about Cronenberg is, he's not quite as visually bravura a cinematic storyteller as Hitchcock. Neither a minimalist in the Jarmusch mode nor a maestro of near-operatic flourish in the Scorsesean sense, Cronenberg's pitch comes straight down the middle, in a sense, he rarely does anything to call attention to his technique. What we think of as characteristically Cronenbergian derives from what he shows us—and over the course of five decades of filmmaking he's shown us explosing heads, human VCR slots, talking assholes, venereal-disease quasi-slugs, and so on—not from how he shows it to us, which is distinctive only by way of being largely head-on, without flinching (although we may flinch, ourselves), a very nearly clinical perspective.

In A Dangerous Method the material doesn't give him anything all that terribly upsetting to show us, at least not upsetting in that visceral way that exploding heads and talking assholes might be. But still. That "nearly" clinical perspective; it's not uniformly neutral, not in this film, not in any of Cronenberg's film. More often than not Cronenberg is happy to have us believe that the camera is merely making a record (c.f. Cronenberg's haunting 2000 short Camera), while he very subtly manipulates the perspective. I took particular note in this film of a scene early on in which the pioneering psychoanalyst Carl Jung, played by Michael Fassbender, begins his treatment of the "hysterical" Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). The two sit on plain chairs in a bare room; Jung sits behind Sabina, so that his presence may not become a distraction to her. They discuss her childhood, dreams, all that kind of psychoanalytic stuff (she talks about "some kind of mollusk moving against my back" which brought to my mind a mental picture from Cronenberg's very early feature It Came From Within/Shivers), but that's not what's paramount here. The crucial section of the scene consists of three shots. The first is a very properly—classically, you might say—composed medium shot in which we see Fassbender and Knightley from the waist up. Fassbender's sitting very still, but Knightley's Sabina is knotting up as she speaks; she's a collection of tics, she keeps setting and resetting her jaw and intertwining her arms and leaning forward as she speaks, and her behavior winds the still shot up, gives it a building tension; and Cronenberg holds the shot for a long time. He then cuts to a tighter medium shot isolating Fassbender, who's still unmoving, but is looking rather fervently forward and to the right of the frame (his left) at Knightley's back. We cannot read his expression with anything like certitude, but it's clear he's highly engaged. Cronenberg then cuts back to the prior two-shot, and after holding it long enough to sufficiently re-ground the viewer in it, starts to move the camera, slowly, to the right and forward simultaneously, until Fassbender's out of the shot and Knightley's isolated in it. The camera is, in effect, following Jung's wishes, seeing her the way he wants to see her; if not yet wanting her, utterly fascinated with her.

At this point I could be coy and say "If that isn't visual storytelling, I don't know what is," but screw it, that is visual storytelling, and the critic who can't see it is not a critic I'm inclined to trust. Please note that I said "can't see it," not "isn't impressed/moved by it" or "doesn't admire it." I can't tell another person what to think or how to feel about a film or a sequence in a film. But I can ask a person to look at what's in front of him or her before he or she presumes to assess it.

And of course I figure that Cronenberg doesn't expect the mass of this film's audience to parse his sequences in precisely the way that I'm doing. There's more, of course. Look at Knightley's look, particularly in the earliest parts of the movie. While Fassbender's Jung is a ruddy-cheeked Aryan and Viggo Mortensen's Sigmund Freud mostly a hearty greying eminence, Sabina is a ravishing sepia smudge, a study in dun and talcum white. The shadows beneath her eyes are vampirish, or even, let's say, vampish; the film does begin in 1904, just as the cinematic codification of the feminine is beginning. Then there's the fact that all of the film's sex scenes are in fact scenes within secnes; they're all shot as seen in mirrors in Sabina's room. All this figures in creating, at least as far as I'm concerned, powerful senses of the Other, otherness, and even other-worldly-ness. All of which is brought down with hammerlike world historical force in an admitedly verbal pronouncement made by Mortensen's Freud to Sabina late in the film, as Sabina is herself preparing to become a psychoanalyst, and resolves on a shudderingly tragic note with the film's last line and its text epilogues on the fates of its main characters.

Again, I believe Cronenberg means all this to be intuited rather than parsed by the viewers, but I think I've given you enough here to convince you that maybe this ain't an impersonal Masterpiece Theater move by the master. And again I insist that Rabid is a corresponding touchstone here, as is his galvanizing, self-starring 2007 short (which he made for the Cannes Film Festival's Chacun son cinema commemoration), At The Suicide Of The Last Jew In The World in the Last Cinema in the World. We'll discuss this further when the film opens in November.

September 09, 2011

Various and sundry have asked for my reaction to a flailingly querulous I-hate-to-call-it-an-essay at a website called The New Inquiry. Said, no-I-won't-call-it-an-essay because it's more a...prose thing, yes, said prose-thing, entitled "Towards A New Film Criticism," authored by the evocatively-named Willie Osterweil, kicks things off by bringing up Big Macs ('cause they're mass produced, you see), then turns his nose up at what he believes is auteurist-based criticism, arguing, or rather stating, that there are no "auteurs" in Hollywood, and that what's taken for a personal artistic signature in the case of someone like Tarantino is really nothing more than a compendium of branding tics. Warming to his topic, he insists:

For mainstream entertainment films, the director must be considered little more than a manager. “But, but, but,” one might protest. “There’s internal consistency to the films of some of the biggest-budget directors—Paul Greengrass, Zach Snyder, Christopher Nolan —these guys have a definable style!” They certainly do, because cinema has been structured around maintaining and capitalizing on the myth of the artist-director.

You see what he's doing there, with the talking straw man and all. The only actual critic he quotes is David Edelstein, whom he characterizes as "levelheaded (if mediocre)," and I hope someone's checked to make sure that this devastating attack hasn't sent poor David to the bathtub with a straight razor. For the rest of the piece he reverts to the royal we:

Film criticism must dismiss the concept of auteurs and understand the film as a mass-produced object. Just like a cheap beer on a hot day or a fast food burger on a long road trip, entertainment cinema can be truly satisfying, but do we discuss a Big Mac the same way we talk about a three-star meal? Do we enjoy a Bud by the same criteria of a perfectly crafted Belgian beer? So why do we talk about Thor the same way we talk about Carlos?

Short answer is, we don't. Long answer is, well, why the fuck should I go to the trouble of digging up examples of how we don't if you can't dig up examples of how we do?

Later Little Willie starts rewriting Gang Of Four lyrics, and badly:

Feel lonely? Don’t worry, someday your eyes will meet those of your perfect mate.Wait for the end of your loneliness, don’t change your behavior or your expectations, but make sure you look good, always, so your love can recognize you in one glance. Feel powerless? You might be a wizard, or a superhero, or friends with a secret agent: At the very least, there’s one coming to rescue you.Don’t worry, individuals will always have the power to overcome and appear when they’re needed, so don’t unite or organize. Think being poor sucks? But even this fat slob succeeded by being in the right place at the right time! Keep working. Opportunity comes for everyone.

Just imagine the italicized parts as the bits that Andy Gill speaks after Jon King sings the plain text. Still doesn't work, right? (As it happens, Mr. Osterwiel himself has a band, "provocatively" named Vulture Shit, that could have just as well been named, say, Gang Of Why The Hell Did We Bother.) Anyway, for some reason this dogshit has excited some commenters on the interwebs, including, I regret to say, the otherwise, what's the word, oh yes, levelheaded, Kevin B. Lee, who was moved to interview Mr. Osterweil, whose responses are, in the parlance of what he (Osterweil) calls "The Current," comedy gold. "I think theory is too bogged down in questions of definition and accuracy, and I think people who write it should take more risks." Suck on that for a minute; and now consider that the pronouncement comes immediately after he pulls, directly from his ass, a description of how the filmmakers he approves of get their pictures made. Also, it's Potter Stewart, not "The Supreme Court." In any event, the best part is at the end, when Osterwiel tells Lee that "I am for the end of all professions, because I am for the end of capitalism." You can tell Willie is only a little past the legal drinking age, because it's clearly never occurred to him that there's a correspondence between the "perfectly crafted Belgian beer" his dick is so hard for and, erm, capitalism. Just in case The Man is looking for a way to really hit Little Willie where it hurts.